Teachable Moments: Vannevar Bush regarded science as a savior

Managed government research in WW II, and predicted the Internet

8:45 PM,
Mar. 10, 2014

Vannevar Bush helped establish the Manhattan Project and worked with the site selection teams, including this one. From left to right are Bush, James B. Conant, Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves and Col. Franklin Matthias

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In July 1945, with the war in Europe over and a month before Japan suffered the consequences of two atomic bombs, Vannevar Bush, who had been President Franklin Roosevelt's science czar during World War II, wrote an article for The Atlantic magazine that was a harbinger of the technological future.

The article was Bush's road map for what scientific inquiry could achieve in the post-war world. His predictions were eerily accurate, including the way Internet hyperlinks work and the creation of mass accumulations of online information.